Villain Hitting at the Canal Road Flyover
Under a road bridge in one of the densest shopping districts on earth, about ten women sit at folding tables and beat paper effigies of your enemies with a shoe. It costs around 50 Hong Kong dollars and takes about five minutes. The government lists the practice as intangible cultural heritage and has separately confirmed that it licenses none of it.
Field Guide Entry
The place
The stalls sit in the gloom beneath the Canal Road Flyover in Causeway Bay, between traffic above and traffic on both sides, a few minutes from Times Square. The spot is not accidental. This is a three-way junction, and the junction is held to be where malign forces cross, which is the sort of place the rite is supposed to be performed.
The rite
You give a name, or a description, or just a category of person: a colleague, a landlord, an ex. The practitioner writes it on a paper cutout of a figure, lights incense, makes an offering to the gods, then takes off a shoe and beats the paper against a brick while reciting what is being driven away. A paper tiger is fed, the remains are burned, and the session closes with a blessing and a charm for the client.
Practitioners are mostly elderly women who learned by apprenticeship, and they have worked this junction for decades.
What the government did with it
Hong Kong added villain hitting to its inventory of intangible cultural heritage in 2014, and TIME had already named it, in 2009, the best way in Asia to get something off your chest.
The recognition and the regulation do not match. Asked about accreditation for the practitioners under the flyover, the government has stated that the activity is a commercial service conducted by service providers, requiring no licence or certification, and that about ten stalls operate there year round. The result is a heritage practice the state names but does not administer.
Who comes
Office workers on lunch breaks, people in the middle of a court case or a divorce, tourists, and a steady trade around the start of spring. The women will tell you that the point is not the curse. It is the five minutes of being listened to while somebody hits your problem with a shoe.
Visiting Information
Free to watch and about 50 Hong Kong dollars to have a session done, cash only, with stalls open through the day and into the evening year round. The busiest run is the start of spring, when queues form.
It is a working street trade, not a show. The polite order is to watch from a distance, ask before photographing a practitioner or a client, and pay for a session if you want to be close to one. Sessions are conducted in Cantonese, and the older practitioners may have little English, though the transaction rarely needs much.
The junction sits between Causeway Bay and Wan Chai, a short walk from Causeway Bay MTR, with traffic overhead and on both sides, which is loud but part of the experience.
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